Vietnam Punishes Tortured Pastor After He Revealed Human Rights Abuses to US
Officials

By Samuel
Smith, CP Reporter

Jun 15, 2017

The wife of a
pastor imprisoned in Vietnam says government officials have locked her husband
away in a cramped space in retaliation for informing U.S. officials during a
visit in May about the brutality that he has faced as a prisoner of conscience.

Pastor Nguyen
Cong Chinh, an outspoken evangelical pastor and pro-democracy activist, was
arrested in 2011 and charged with undermining national security. Chinh, who is
the founder of the Vietnamese People's Evangelical Fellowship and has spoken out
against a preaching ban in the Central Highlands, was sentenced to 11 years of
imprisonment.

Chinh's wife,
Tran Thi Hong, told the Asia-based Catholic news outlet ucanews.com that
her husband met with officials from the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City on
May 25 and detailed how he has been physically and mentally tortured inside the
three prisons he has been held in over the last six years.

"Chinh said on
the previous day, prison officials informed him about the meeting and asked him
not to tell the visitors anything that would make them look bad," Hong said,
explaining that she met with her husband last Wednesday.

However, Chinh
did not obey that order.

"He told the
delegation his experiences of torture, threats and mistreatment that he has
endured over six years," Hong said.

According to
Hong, her husband told the U.S. officials that prison guards put shards of glass
in his food, beat him, put him in stocks, locked him in solitary confinement and
subjected him to other forms of corporal punishment.

Because Chinh did
not give into his captors' demands to keep quiet about the abuses he suffered,
Hong said her husband was punished.

Hong explained
that immediately after the U.S. delegation left the prison, Chinh was locked
away in a cramped space and was kept isolated from the rest of the prison
population as punishment.